Saturday Morning
by vaurienne
Summary: The man I love is waiting for me at the other end of the aisle. This moment is one I’ve been waiting a lifetime for. So why do I still feel like I’m not ready?


All my fantasies led to this point, to this very moment in time. All my hopes and dreams culminate in this moment. The white silk of my dress is flowing around my ankles. My flowers are settled in the crook of my arm. And the man I love is waiting for me at the other end of the aisle. The priest is standing there, beaming down at us. I can see my father out of the corner of my eye, his form made slightly indistinct by the sheer fabric of my veil. This moment is one I've been waiting a lifetime for.

So why do I still feel like I'm not ready?

I think that I was almost the last person to know that anything was going on between the two of us. We'd been friends for years, since almost the very beginning, but I thought that's all it was. Everyone around me knew that it was something more than just that, but I never thought about it. Not really. I couldn't think about it.

The reasons that I state in my own defense about why I 'couldn't' think about him – about us – like that aren't really reasons. They're reasons why there couldn't be an us, but not reasons why I couldn't think about it. Still, I took those reasons why there couldn't be an us and they became reasons why I couldn't think about there ever being one. Over the years, they became so deeply ingrained that I never considered it, even though I'm sure people thought that I did.

All of these realizations are retrospective, as so many of them are. It took years before he finally did anything, and, when he did, I was shocked. It turned the world that I'd constructed upside down and I had to relearn everything. No one else was surprised. They'd all known that it would happen eventually. I was the last to learn that there was something between us, and the first to know when that something finally became real, if that makes any sense.

Nothing about this seems to make sense though. There's no logic to love, and you can't force there to be any. Love doesn't abide by the normal rules of how things are supposed to work. It has its own rules, and they can change in a heartbeat. I should know. I've lost count of the number of times that they've changed on me, changed on us.

It was never easy, the two of us being together. We had a few hours here and there, but life kept moving without regard to what we wanted, and we were swept along with the flow. We both did what we could, but it was never easy. Things were hard sometimes, but we made it through those times somehow. We made it through those hard times together, just like we enjoyed the good times.

From almost the beginning, he had an instinct to confirm, even if he didn't say it that way at first. He had an idea of what he wanted, and he had to convince himself. He had to win a battle between his heart and his head. His heart told him one thing, and he had to find the arguments to support it. For him, the course was simple. Either his heart was right or it wasn't, in which case everything was wrong.

I have never been that sure. I could picture a life with him, even though it wasn't like anything that we'd shared together. I could see the picture in my mind, as clear as though it were real. But I wasn't sure if I wanted it to be real. He already had a life and a career. He was well on his way down whatever path would define his life. I was still trying to find mine. I wasn't even sure if it really existed. And I wasn't sure if there was room on his path for me to walk beside him.

For me, the battle wasn't between my head and my heart. It was more complicated than just that. My head could provide me with all the logic that I needed, but I wasn't sure where my heart was trying to lead me. I loved him. I knew that. I couldn't imagine a life without him. But I didn't know if I wanted to live my life with him.

I was expecting it when he asked. We'd talked about it before and I knew that he'd been thinking about it for a long time, ever since there was first an us. I was expecting the question, and I thought I knew what I was going to say. I thought I was ready for it. He was the man I'd loved since before I first thought about loving him. He was the man I couldn't imagine life without.

But when that life together started to become more real, all of a sudden I couldn't imagine a life with him anymore. I wanted it. I wanted to be able to see it, but it disappeared from my sight. The real had supplanted the imaginary and there was no more time for dreams because I had to contend with what was in front of me.

I said yes. I told him that I wanted to spend the rest of my life at his side and he slid the ring onto my finger. It wasn't what I would have chosen for myself, but it was beautiful. I loved it because I loved him. I wore it to proudly display the love that we shared and as a visible hope of the life that we would have together.

And yet, as I step down the aisle toward that life together, I can't remember a time when I've ever been more scared. I don't look at him, but I can feel his eyes on me. I don't look at him because I don't know what I might see if I do. I look down at the flowers in my arms, thinking of the contrast between my white dress and the red roses.

We are a contrast, the pair of us. And yet, like the red against the white, we compliment one another. He can supply what I lack. He can be what I can't be, do what I can't bring myself to do. He is the alpha to my omega, the end to my beginning. I love him, and he loves me.

He tells me I'm beautiful, even when I've just woken up and I know that I'm not. He catches me when I fall. He holds me when I'm sick and doesn't protest when I steal his dessert, even though he offers to get me some and I decline. He challenges me to be better, and he loves me as I am. He is the man that I love with my whole heart, with my whole being, with everything that I have.

He is the man who will be my husband, my partner. He is the man who I have promised to spend forever with. I will pledge him my laughter and my tears, my joy and my pain. I will share with him all that I have and all that I am, for all eternity. But what if I'm not ready for eternity?

When I could picture a life together for us, I saw it as a series of Saturday mornings. It was a series of snapshots, a view of hypothetical moments frozen in time. I saw us raising a family together, growing old together. It wasn't perfect, but life isn't perfect. It was messy, and it was loud. It was kids who forgot to put their toys away, and a hockey game that was turned up too loud. It was cereal bowls left out on the table, and a screaming infant.

I told him about those imagined moments once, when we first started to discuss forever. He preferred to discuss the grand theory of forever because it was less real, less immediate. I preferred not to think of the concept because it was too vast to understand. Now I have a feeling that he's thinking of all the moments, and I'm trying to grapple with the concept. This is a bad time to be doing it, as I'm walking down the aisle on my wedding day. I thought I had solved it all long ago. I thought I was ready for this.

Now my dad is giving him my hand. His hand is on mine, and I look up from it to meet his eyes. Whatever I was fearing, I don't find it there. But that doesn't mean that I'm not scared. Forever is huge. Forever is bigger than just the two of us. It's bigger than I can comprehend and not something that I'm ready for.

In my mind, I grasp wildly for something, for anything to get me out of this, for something that will stop forever, because I'm not ready for it. And only then do I remember.

It's Saturday morning.


End file.
